Giovanni Arpino's 1969 novel has befallen the curious fate of losing its original title, Il Buio e il Miele (The Darkness and the Honey), to the much more famous name of the two films it inspired. It is a legacy that reflects the strange sense of lingering anonymity, of relentless self-erasure, that permeates this haunting text from start to finish.

Fausto, a former military officer who was blinded and crippled by a bomb explosion, embarks upon a week-long journey across Italy, travelling down through Genoa and Rome towards Naples. Accompanying him as his guide is the novel's narrator, a young soldier who must learn to acclimatise to Fausto's fits of fury and merciless cynicism. The relationship that develops between the two is not predictably redemptive – their intimacy is built more on brutal reality than any notions of friendship or loyalty.

The soldiers' journey is ironically evocative of a Homeric epic, with Fausto as its drunken antihero, gleefully heralding his own damnation every step of the way. Arpino is unflinching on the complexities of his characters. He treats the subject of blindness with unsentimental candour ("It's not a Greek tragedy, it's a misfortune"), and his deft sense of humour and flashes of tenderness rescue the book from existential angst.

Fausto's eventual surrender to love and trust plays out as a tragic, bittersweet defeat - "Because," as the last chapter testifies, "there is also a kind of man who can only be explained by dying."

The novel ultimately resists explanation as much as it defers its destination, the final , hanging line questioning the act of representation itself: "And the blank space that follows is not yet death."

Anne Milano Appel's sensitive translation of this unsung novel opens it up to the revival it deserves.